Healthy Schools Story: Rio Hondo Elementary

August 16, 201916

My name is Diana Elliot and I teach first grade at Rio Hondo School. One of the things that I see has been changing is more of the integration of trying to tie in telling time with some kind of physical activity, what we call the TPR, Total Physical Response; it’s to get the kids to move their whole body. If they’re not doing physical education, moving their body, you won’t be able to activate their brains and then they’ll be stressed out. Because there’s so many benefits of physical activity that can boost their immune system, get them to pay attention to you, all these great things that impacts their learning and definitely impacts their physical body. I’m kind of obsessed with, how can I make that lesson better, or how can I tie in some physical activity to get all everything in their brain going and seeing all the lights go on. So one of the games is subtraction relay. There’s two boxes, the kids are in two teams of relays and their are index cards with the numbers 0 through 10 and I show the kids, “12 – 3” and those two kids, it’s their turn and they had to run over there and grab the nine and come back, and however got to it first got the point. So they’re always excited. I do spelling aerobics with my kids, where they have to do their aerobic activities, whether it’s like kickboxing, whatever, the bootcamp mountain climbers on the floor, their “T-H-E” the, or whatever the word is–I do that on a regular basis with them. One of the things that I have done personally at this school, that’s really benefited the most; we didn’t used to do our Walk-a-Thon before. The Walk-A-Thon is fantastic, because it’s a healthy fundraiser, and as a result, we’re able to raise enough money to have funding to go on field trips, despite all the budget cuts happening. So the Walk-A-Thon is so fantastic; we’re getting the kids moving, they’re excited, they love it, we’ve got great music playing, and they’re also motivated too because they know that they’re doing something to help out their school and at the same time they’re getting more physical activity. We’re doing a lot of stuff to motivate the kids and raise money in a healthy way.